When using custom colors for tabs, the selected tab is sometimes not clearly distinguishable

Fortunately, the extension has a couple of hidden options that will let you alleviate these two points, as well as others that hopefully will help you in your daily work. During development of the extension we experimented internally with many different options for the features available in the extension. For the first release it was decided that exposing all options could be confusing and overwhelming to our users, and so the options dialog UI was simplified. You will find here all options that were hidden due to this simplification. I encourage you to try them out and let us know if you find them useful or not.

Pinned Tabs Options

Pin button visible in unpinned tabs

This has been added to the options UI in our latest release.

Maintain pinned status if document is removed from document well

By default, when a document is pinned and it is removed from the document well (by making it float or closing it) it loses its pinned status, and you will need to mark it as pinned again when you return it to the document well. Running the following command will maintain pinned status for documents that are floated or closed. Pinned status will only be removed if you manually unpin the tab.

Pinned tabs appear in original order

By default, when you pin tabs they will be added to the pinned tabs group in the order in which they were pinned. Running the following command will make them appear in the order in which they originally appeared instead:

This might become more clear with an example. Say you had the following three tabs open:

By default, when you pin Class3.cs, then Class2.cs, then Class1.cs, they will appear in the order in which they were pinned, as shown here:

After running the above command and pinning the three tabs in the same order shown above, however, they will appear as follows, which is the same order in which they appeared originally:

Tab Panel Position

By default tabs appear on top of the document well. The options UI provides the ability to show tabs vertically, which positions them on the left of the well. Additionally, the extension has the ability to position tabs on the bottom and on the right of the document well.

Tabs on bottom of document well

Run the following command to position tabs on the bottom of the document well:

Notice that gradient for unselected tabs starts with the custom color and fades to the default VS unselected tab color, which is transparent. The selected tab gradient starts with the custom color and fades to the default VS selected tab color, which is yellow.

Custom color fades to more intense tab color

Run the following command to make the tab gradient go from the custom color to a more intense shade of the same custom color:

Regular expression colors have precedence over project colors

By default, if you turn on both tab coloring by project and by regular expressions, regular expression colors will have precedence over project colors. You can run the following command to make project colors have precedence over regular expression colors instead:

Regular Expression Options

Use full document path for regular expression match

By default, only the text that is visible in the tab is used to match regular expression for custom coloring. You can run the following command to instead match the full document path, which gives you greater flexibility:

Changelog

Version 10.0.10710.22

Added registry key for matching full document path when using regular expressions for custom colors

Tell Us What You Think

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you find these options useful or not. You will find a hyperlink in our options dialog which you can use to provide us with feedback. You can also add comments to this post directly, add/contribute to a discussion in the Visual Studio Gallery page for the Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools, or send us feedback directly at docwell2010plus [at] microsoft.com.

Radames Cruz Moreno – Software Developer, Visual Studio Platform Team Biography: Radames arrived at Microsoft in 2008, just in time to help with development of Visual Studio 2010 since its early stages. He worked mainly helping develop the new WPF window docking system. Prior to that he worked in several interesting projects in Mexico using every technology and language imaginable, from C++ and Java to COBOL (shudder).